22 July 2013

Poem of the Week 2013/30

Orchards in JulyWaters from cold springsand glittering mineralstirelessly wander.Patient, unceasing,they overcome granite, layersof hungry gravel, iridescentprecincts of clay. If they abandonthemselves to the blackroots it's only to goup, as high as possiblethrough wells hiddenunder the bark of fruit trees. Throughthe green touched with gray, of leaves,fallen petals of whiteflowers with rosy edges,apples heavy with sweet rednessand their bitterish seeds.O, waters from coldsprings and glitteringminerals! You are awaitedby a cirrus with a fluid,sunny outlineand by an abyss of bluewhich has been rinsedin the just wind.Zbigniew Machej, translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass

I wanted to slip this in before July slipped away. There's a nice circle-of-life thing going on here; the waters and minerals seem almost more alive than the trees they pass through on their way from the earth up to the clouds. The poet ends with a little zinger, the piquant adjective "just" – what makes an impersonal force like wind "just"? Perhaps it's exactly because it is impersonal, doing what it does impartially. The adjective closes out the cycle with a sense that things are doing what they're meant to be doing; it's sort of a more sciencey version of the feeling described by another poet as "God's in His Heaven, All's right with the world."

Machej is a twentieth-century Polish poet. This poem is from the anthology A Book of Luminous Things, edited by Czeslaw Milosz.